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(1)Squall Leonhart vs (4)Zelda 2018
Ulti's Analysis Throughout any contest, you'll see a bunch of topics talking about stars and turds each round. I don't get involved in doing all that every round, but this match showed a wonderful contrast between the two. Zelda, the clear star of this contest as of this match, didn't just beat Squall. She destroyed him. After the early board vote went Squall's way because of brackets or whatever have you, Zelda went out there and put down a beating so bad that if you ran the numbers, this result puts her squarely and high up in the Noble Nine level. Some people weren't ready to go there, but I was. I have the second chance picks to prove it, and even I didn't go far enough because Zelda was on the juice all contest long. She was like this in the first two rounds too, but this was the match that really made people notice. The really scary thing is this didn't start off all that bad, but within 10 minutes this was a laughable blowout. It was basically this match in reverse, actually. Zelda went out there and got some revenge for her distant cousin from the Mario games: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/1339-north-division-round-2-squall-leonhart-vs-luigi On the other side was this contest's biggest turd. You cannot go out there and get 37% as a 1 seed in round 3. You just can't. I don't care who or what you're up against. This was a thorough embarrassment and there is no defense for it, regardless of how down Square is. That 1 seed line is supposed to be special. We had three 1 seeds in this contest that completely failed the 1 seed line for various reasons -- Dante, 2B, and Squall. Squall by far had the worst exit, and I don't know how he comes back from this. Even a port of Final Fantasy 8 to the PS4 wouldn't help at this point, I don't think. By the way, fuck you Square for not saving the original files and giving FF8 the love it deserves. You save it all for every other game except 8? Really? Fuck you Square. No wonder you suck eggs outside of one game on this site. Seriously, look it up. Pretty much every other game in that series has been ported or rereleased at some point all the way up to 12. That company is such a joke at this point and it's a big reason I enjoyed this match so much. Nintendo's online may suck, but at least I can tell they care about their fans when I play their games. Square literally does not give a shit anymore. I used to be very much in the Square camp whenever these duels would happen in contests, but outside of FF7 I am firmly in the Nintendo camp now. They've won me back. As such, this match was great. The star of the contest stomped, and though I like Squall a lot he represents Square's idiocy. FF8 not being ported yet is such a joke. For those who don't understand what I mean about losing source files, I am in no way kidding. Square really is that stupid and Squall is paying for it: https://www.vg247.com/2018/09/14/isnt-ps4-xbox-switch-port-final-fantasy-8-preservation-may-answer/ Safer777's Analysis Don't know what to say. Look at this. Okay. Let us talk about this. Before the contest Squall was the favorite but Zelda had supporters too. As the contest went on Zelda became the favorite but Squall wasn't out too. But man. Don't know. When I first checked the results I thought there was a rally. Or something. Still I can't believe it. A little bit of history for Squall in the contests. 1st contest Squall loses to Snake. 2nd contest Squall loses to Samus. 3rd contest Squall loses to Cloud. 4th contest Squall loses to Vincent but barely enough and Vincent was a beast back then. 5th contest Squall loses to Snake. 6th contest Squall loses to Snake. 7th contest Squall loses to Mewtwo BUT there were 3 Square characters in that match so a lot of SFF. 8th contest Squall loses to Snake(his cryptonite). 9th contest Squall loses to Vivi but Pokemon was rallied and of course Vivi is another Square character so SFF again. So why I wrote all this? To see that Squall is pretty damn strong! Some people were saying he might be the strongest character in the bracket except Sephiroth of course! So for 1 VS 1 Squall has lost only to N9er's except Vincent back then when he even defeated Crono indirectly. So for Zelda. She hasn't done well in the contests except the Female one where of course she did well, duh. I mean which females are strong here? Tifa, Samus and Zelda. Maybe Aeris too. So NOBODY could predict this result. NOBODY. Don't deny this. So what is going on? Squall has fallen this much or Zelda has risen this much? Maybe a combination of both or just 1 of them? According to these results Zelda beats Squall's opponents with like 85% to 90%. No way this is right. I can't fathom this. But if the boost to Zelda and Link is real and it is so strong that means that nobody can break even 35% on Link! Even with strong rallies. Seriously. So once again I don't know what to say. The only good thing I can say is that makes Ezio looking somewhat decent. And congrats to Zelda. This match was the one that nobody expected this result, at least not this much difference in percentages. Man Link will beat another Nintendo character with like 80%! Damn! This contest has lost all credibility! Nah just kidding about the last part. Impressive win no matter how you see it. The prediction percentage was really good for Zelda too. Guess a lot of people saw this? Well I certainly didn't and the board didn't too. Tsunami's Analysis Well. This is certainly a thing that happened. And it was terrifying. Squall has been in every contest, and he's consistently been one of the top midcarders, though it took until CBII for this to really be noticed due to some horrendous seeding in 2002 that saw Squall fed to a Noble Niner in Round 1, and a Noble Niner that was actually seeded properly (which not all of them were). How bad? He was a 15-seed. Anyone who's been reading these write-ups in order should already know how few 15-2 upsets there have been, and while the 2-seed line was in fact the strongest in 2002 (Three Noble Niners were 2-seeds, while only two were 1-seeds and the two 1-seeds that weren't Noble Niners have both missed contests outright since then), Crash Bandicoot was also there. Just picture (2)Crash Bandicoot vs (15)Squall Leonhart for a moment. Yeah, 2002 was weird. Squall's not even the only 15-seed that year that could've beaten Crash, so he's lucky that he got a 15-seed that was actually legitimately bad instead. Now, Zelda hasn't been there for every contest, because for some reason it took until CBII for any Nintendo franchise to have multiple representatives in the contest unless you consider Mario and Donkey Kong to technically be the same franchise due to their shared origins. But she's been in every contest since then save for CBIII, and it's usually taken a Noble Niner to defeat her (though she did come in second in a fourway to Vincent in a "clean" match, one round before Link showed up and absolutely annihilated her). All things considered, this result might've been far more expected if not for a handful of votes. Stop and think about it for a moment. Yeah, that's right. Zelda lost to Charizard by all of 15 votes in 2013. And it was widely expected that Charizard would be able to take advantage of Zero's demonstrated ability to not get SFFed into oblivion by Mega Man (see: Weighted Companion Cube, 2008) to win Division 9. Charizard was considered a disappointment in part for failing to do this, by the only slightly less narrow margin of 23 votes, but also for nearly getting "upset" the round before by Zelda. Now, remember also that Pokémon had a representative in almost every match near the end of that contest. Divisions 2, 5, 6, and 8 had all been won by Pokémon entrants, which meant all three Contest Semifinals would also contain one. There was serious Pokéfatigue. Is it unreasonable to think that, had Zelda managed to muster up those 16 extra votes needed to beat Charizard, she could've done what he couldn't and beaten Mega Man? And then of course she easily outpaces Red in the contest semis to get to the 4th place match and, just as Mega did, has no trouble handling the LFF-afflicted Mewtwo and Pikachu to win that match. But back to the match at hand. Nintendo had clearly boosted, and Zelda especially seemed strong, so most Oracles, at least, saw this coming, selecting Zelda at a bit over a 5 to 1 ratio. (Gurus, not so much. 93-65 in favor of Squall.) But the magnitude? Not even close. Zelda won with 63.32%, 3.31% above the highest-scoring Oracle prediction...which was itself 2.75% above the #2 Oracle prediction. This was just a gobsmacking. And of course, everyone was quick to dump on Squall, because taking this at face value would mean Zelda was at Noble Nine level, and that just couldn't make sense. After all, it's called "Noble Nine level" for a reason, and that's because they're the only nine that can ever reach it naturally. L-Block and Draven got there with rally power, sure, but when a Noble Niner loses a legitimate match? Only happens because of the Noble Niner's decline. Not because the other character has strengthened to their level. That just can't happen. And yes, it took a conscious effort to write "couldn't" and "can't" rather than "didn't" and "shouldn't". Or "won't". Because that's the way most of the old guard thinks. The Noble Nine, and their peak games (okay mostly just OoT, CT, FFVII, and to a lesser extent ALttP/SMW/SMB3), are put on a pedestal. They've finally accepted that they're not all going to stay invincible forever, but the idea that something else could be as strong as they once were... ...well, it wasn't always that way. CBII was, in many ways, a very weird contest, because a bunch of side characters from games whose main characters were in CBI debuted and people expected these side characters to be stronger than their leads for some reason. Maybe because leads tend to be bland. People figured that if Crono could come as close as he did to Mario, then Magus should be able to outright win the contest--but on the other hand, Mario has no real personality at all so surely Luigi will be even stronger than Mario. As awful as CBIII was for all of the SFF matches, it was, one supposes, at least useful for derailing that kind of misguided thinking. But on the flip side, it might just have been what led to this kind of misguided thinking, that the Noble Nine have some sort of untouchable aura that no other character will ever be able to attain. Well, okay, there's that, and there's also the fact that new characters tend to do poorly, and the inherent advantage of having existed for a long time means that anything that could''be on that level ''would have shown that capability by now. That is an entirely more logical reason for thinking that no other character would ever be able to dominate non-fodder the way the Noble Nine do, or once did. Forgive me, I've been railing against the unwillingness to see members of the Noble Nine weakening for so long that I overlooked that the converse, that nothing else will ever rise up to that level, actually had a logical basis. That said, there was something overlooked, and if you scroll back up to the point where I mentioned the games that are treated with the same reverence as the Noble Nine, you'll probably figure out what it is. No, that wasn't an accidental omission. This contest, Smash Ultimate was certainly considered a factor as to why Nintendo--and certain non-Nintendo characters--had boosted, but far too often, Smash is overlooked. I suspect that this is because of one of the exact same things that I consider to be among the three reasons that Melee isn't looked at in the same light as those other games. Namely, Brawl. The threefold reason that Melee isn't given the reverence it deserves are the loss to Brawl in GotD, rallying to turn what was already an assured 55-45 win into a 60-40 win in BGE3, and rallying again to defeat Chrono Trigger in BGE3. That last one, I assume, brings this into grudge territory, because this board loves Chrono Trigger almost as much as it loves Phoenix Wright. (I promise, when I decide to go back and play Chrono Trigger, I'll make a playthrough topic. It's something I intend to do because the reasons that I vaguely remember hating it the first time I played it were things that I actually enjoyed when I encountered them in FFVI, so I'm fairly certain that I'd actually like the game if I tried it again.) But back to why Brawl is relevant. In 2007, a bunch of characters made their Character Battle debuts based on being announced for Brawl, and even more debuted in 2008 for getting into Brawl. And the newcomers were largely underwhelming in the contests, which led to everyone believing that Smash wasn't really as big a boost as it seemed. It is. They were just looking at things the wrong way. See, being new to Smash is only good for a small boost. But here's the secret. Each time you appear in a Smash game? The boost gets bigger. Remember, Metroid Prime wasn't even out when Character Battle I happened. Super Metroid is certainly an all-time classic, but being one of the Original Twelve (and the Original Eight, at that), surely gave Samus the added strength to be a Noble Niner right from the start. (Though maybe people put too much weight on the lack of a Metroid game since SM at the time of CBI; it's only a year older than Chrono Trigger and actually had a PAL release on its initial system to boot.) Kirby, of course, gets most of his strength from Smash even now. Same goes for Captain Falcon. And of course, Fox. He had a pretty decent contest this year even though he hasn't had a game anyone really cared about since 1997. (Star Fox Zero got panned for being too much of a retread of 64, but given how poorly received every game since then has been with the exception of the literal SF64 remake on the 3DS, why shouldn't ''they try to stick with what people liked?) And it most certainly has trickled down to Melee's cast of newcomers, or at least, some of them. Conventional wisdom coming into this year was that no one really ''cares about Peach; she's just an apathy vote magnet. Which...okay that would actually be a pretty decent explanation for why she gave Alucard a better match than either of his next two opponents; this contest's format made "apathy vote magnet" a surprisingly strong thing to be. And of course, Mewtwo is still the second-most consistently strong Pokémon...actually let's face it, Mewtwo should probably be ahead of Charizard in the adjusted X-Stats, because Division 7 is in a horrendous place in the raw X-Stats. Guess which one made it into Smash first. Don't get me wrong, a lot of Smashers would be strong anyway. But Zelda has been there since Melee, and more importantly, there was a kind of big Legend of Zelda game out recently. You know, the series with her name in the title? She was, as usual, only a supporting character despite being the title character, but she still had a pretty decent presence, not to mention one of her best designs yet, which, again, was used for her appearance in Smash Ultimate. Also, if that bit about the Smash Boost becoming stronger with each successive appearance is true? It really explains a lot of characters getting these massive boosts. And sure enough, they did exactly that. Cloud recovered from his signs of weakness in 2013, and Bowser hasn't looked this good since he gave Snake a scare in 2005. You figured it out yet? That's right. This was the first Character Battle since for WiiU/3DS came out. And since they made a point of bringing back everyone from Melee, Brawl, and WiiU/3DS (the original roster has been present in every game anyway), even ill-advised decisions like Pichu, it's a 100% guarantee that any character in Wii U/3DS had their Smash counter incremented by 2 since the most recent contest. So, yeah, there were bound to be some absolutely ridiculous power boosts. Long live NintendoFAQs. Addendum: Response in the topic made it clear that this write-up was poorly worded, as it suggested that later Smash games gave larger boosts to series veterans than to newcomers. A more accurate way of putting it would be that the existence of newer Smash games increases the value of being in older ones, due to the way Nostalgia Factor works. Pokémon is another series with this trait, and one that has it to an even more pronounced degree than Smash, so as both a Generation I Pokémon ''and ''an Original 12 Smasher, Pikachu is by far the most dramatic example of this effect in action. For reference: Pikachu struggling to put away fodder in 2002; Pikachu slaying the threatening joke (and beating another of this year's division winners) in 2008; Pikachu the Noble Nine Breaker in 2018. Category:2018 Contest Matches